In The Crosshairs

How poetry became a crime in Assam

- Samrat

Write

Write down I am a Miya

My serial number in NRC is 20,543

I have two children

Another is coming next summer

Will you hate him as you hate me?

These lines by Hafiz Ahmed, a Muslim poet of Bengali heritage from Assam, could potentially land him in jail. Ahmed is part of a literary movement called “Miya poetry”—Muslims of Bengali origin are referred to as “Miyas” in Assam—that, among other things, highlights the discrimination the community faces in the state. On 11 July, a first-information report was filed against Ahmed, along with nine other Miya poets, who were charged with criminal conspiracy and spreading social disharmony under various sections of the Indian Penal Code.

According to the local Assamese journalist who filed the report, the poems tried to defame the Assamese people as xenophobic, at a time when the National Register of Citizens was being updated in the state.

The poets went into hiding. Several of them put out statements declaring their loyalty to Assamese, a language in which a few of them are pursuing or have obtained doctorates.

Even before the FIR, Miya poetry had already come under the scanner, when one of the most prominent “leftist” intellectuals of Assam, Hiren Gohain, wrote an article in an Assamese daily excoriating the Miya poets for using their own “artificial” East Bengal dialects, rather than Assamese, in their poems. The Miya poets in their statements clarified that most of their poems were in the socially and officially sanctioned language, Assamese, and not in any contraband dialect.

How does a state come to perceive poetry as a crime? How do powerful members of civil society get to dictate in what language poetry is to be written? Why are poets having to distance themselves from the dialects of their ancestors?